


Darkness Take the Last

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Canon-Typical Body Horror, F/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 02:58:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6138972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Hive queen Savathûn approaches the Tower's borders, Eris Morn gets some questionable help from an old friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkness Take the Last

**Author's Note:**

> “She stank of death and life and a million never-sleeping eyes.”
> 
> \- Catherynne Valente, Radiance

I.

  
_Did you miss me?_  
  
_It’s been such a long time, I know. So many circuits of our little, squabbling planets around the sun. It was reassuring to think that some equilibrium had finally been managed in the back-and-forth froth of the cosmic ocean at war, but that isn’t how these things work. You know. Quantum states, uncertainty at the mean mien level. Atoms that just don’t fit right any more._  
  
_There was a chance that the sisters might have turned around, gone off to wreak havoc on other shores. Slim chance, though. Nothing you can count on. You might not have antagonized them so much, but I chase the fight, if not the fighters._  
  
_Let’s talk about that again some time._

  
II.

Eris felt the shift as a physical fall at first, as if the Tower was collapsing. There had been a sense of uncertainty around the Tower for days, something that made veterans ache and newborns stumble around lost. Some City-wide suggestion that the Earth had used up its stores of peace, and a reckoning was coming from the empty rooms.  
  
The days had been a rush before, too, since a second Hive ship had nosed into Saturn’s rings, scattering matter in a sword-shaped trail alongside the Dreadnaught. Eris had done her work, assigning Guardians to hunt the resources the Vanguard needed. A few - the Guardians who had fought Oryx - had been told the great secret. One day the Vanguard would open up that secret to the Tower so that it was no longer whispered: “Kin of Oryx has returned.” “There is no end of them.” “Savathûn is more clever than her brother.” All of it very well could be true.  
  
Darkness and rumors of Darkness, and then Eris felt waves lift up under the world again and knew that a fault line had opened up. She could see, in the daylight in the Vanguard’s atrium, a pillar of light and darkness.  
  
The presence was familiar, like an echo. That had been one of the voices that had called to her, long after the others had left her.  
  
A hated sound that set her in motion. She took the long, long walk, passing a Shaxx who was entirely blind to the moment; by the time he heard the commotion she was past the stairs and into the gentle sunlight of the Vanguard’s bastion. When she caught Ikora’s eyes, the soft look of shock and pity was such a surprise that Eris looked to Cayde - Cayde! - to recover from it. The Exo’s lights were blinking in rapid bursts.  
  
Ikora held out a hand. “Eris. We don’t expect — ”  
  
Eris didn’t hear the words. The rushing sound in her head had grown too loud. Her hands and her breastbone ached, maybe nerves firing in panic.  
  
If only all of them had been there. If only Eriana - Eriana! - had brushed the ash from her hands and laughed. If only Tarlowe - but at that moment all she could remember of Tarlowe was his corpse.

Eris whispered, “He is all of them.”  
  
In the pillar of light and darkness Toland the Shattered looked up, helmetless, and tracked each Guardian in the room as if lining them up for execution. “What’s that? Someone here has assembled the gun.”  
  
He had not manifested here using any Warlock magic that Eris knew, but nor was her knowledge exhaustive. Instead, she cast into the resonances she knew, searching for notes and scents. The deathly rot of Savathûn’s forces lingered on him. Toland felt like something that had been left on the floor of the Dreadnaught to grow spores.  
  
“Why are you here?” Ikora asked him, instantly. Solar energy did not quite kindle on her palms.  
  
Zavala followed. “Why did you choose that form?”  
  
That form: the same as Toland had looked in life, except with three green eyes glowing on his face. He might have been a parody of Eris, except that she remembered when he had worn those eyes in the pit. What surprised her most was that his appearance was probably close to the truth. If she lowered her cowl, the back of her head would be that bad, wrecked and scabbed, the horns growing between clumps of dark hair.  
  
Eris echoed: “Why?”  
  
Toland (the impossible, the dead, another corpse at the gate) spread his hands. “Didn’t I mention it? Savathûn has already planted a dampener in the Warminds. Nothing will see her coming - and she is coming.”  
  
“We know,” said Ikora, still softly. “We are not completely blind.”  
  
“Explain,” Eris said. The word stretched out, got away from her, droned out into the room.    
  
Toland looked at her. The expression in the eyes was blank, but that was familiar; she had seen such rabid resentment looking at her from the faces of Knights in dark hallways so many times. He was not Hive by blood, though, and she couldn’t smell the particular dusty stink of the worms on him. Oh, but he would know their names, and would know their signs. _That_ she missed.  
  
“There was a door that opened, dearest Eris,” Toland said. As he spoke, the stare drifted to the Vanguard. “And beyond the door there was a sitting room, and there sat my lady Savathûn. Shall we walk? she said. And she walked through the walls where there had been no openings before. You might say I rode on her coattails, although they are more scale than coat.”  
  
“Whose _side_ are you on?” Zavala said.  
  
Again Toland looked at Eris. “Straight to the heart of it. I forgot that you’re used to _distinctions_ around here. One great silver talisman, and shall we decide on one death, too? How quaint. I’ll answer you anyway. Let’s see about that.”  
  
Toland smirked. Cayde put one hand over his own face.  
  
“Osiris has spoken of a convergence,” Ikora said, her voice ringing. The Vanguard’s attention was pulled to her before they might even have known it had drifted.  “Perhaps it is upon us now, but his warnings were also cryptic.”  
  
“Big surprise.” Cayde picked up a pen from the table and twirled it between his fingers. “Look, I think we’re missing something big here. Which is that this dead guy - that’s not the unusual part, mind you - has come back to us in order to warn us that his boss is attacking, which we already knew.”  
  
“You were Andal when they exiled me,” Toland said into the quiet.  
  
Cayde’s lights blared affront.  
  
“Savathûn doesn’t give me orders, although it might be a bit much to explain the barycentric cause and effect of the overworld to this metal manager. I may owe her energy, but only as much as you would owe your Ghost for bringing your body back to the fold if you were to mistake your steps at the edge of the Tower. I followed her here.”  
  
Eris’ lip curled as she realized what he wasn’t saying. “It was an accident.”  
  
He tipped his head at her, and _Light_ it was unfair that she saw him crouched in the dark, that same gesture closing an invisible door behind them. With the way the Dreadnaught and the pit fit together, the puzzle-piece geometry of the Hive spaces, it made sense to Eris that (what had once been) Toland had simply fallen through the world in Savathûn’s wake to get here. Pity she didn't trust for a moment that he had simply gotten completely, cosmically lost on his way back from lounging in the torture-rooms of the universe.  
  
She looked at Ikora. “It could have been. Savathûn tears the world open.” She found that she was snapping the words again, angrier at Savathûn than at the exile in front of her.  
  
“That doesn’t answer the question of why you appeared here,” Ikora said to Toland.  
  
“The Vanguard is a nexus of power,” Eris said. “The attention of the Darkness and the Light are both here.”  
  
Toland took two steps away from the table, deliberately shunning the Vanguard. Black dust shed from his boots, as if he had been walking in mud or paint. “I might help you, if you were just a little better organized.”  
  
He walked away. He still wore a Warlock cloak, which flapped and snapped at his knees.  
  
“I will convince him,” Eris said, instantly, and turned to follow as if tugged.  
  
“A moment,” Ikora said, and Eris turned back.  
  
The Warlock Vanguard folded her hands together. “We suspect that this Savathûn may not be what she seems,” Ikora said. Cayde and Zavala glanced at one another over the table, and Eris thought that maybe she had not warned them she would say this.  
  
“There was no warning from the Reef about her approach, and not even from the Cabal. It should have been impossible to get so close undetected. We have found more proof of bent realities and deceptions in the Dreadnaught than the Hive have ever brought against us before, and there are some who believe that this new attack is just another sleight-of-hand trick.”  
  
“We felt the waves breaking … ” Eris sad.  
  
“We felt Toland’s arrival, from whatever Hive dimension he had hidden himself away in,” Ikora said. “You and the Speaker are bulwarks against more tears in the fabric of reality, but I fear … or perhaps hope … that our exile is no more knowledgeable about these hidden Hive passages than the rest of us. Watch him.”  
  
Eris nodded once, unwilling to commit to a more emphatic agreement.  
  
“After you find out what the Hive want,” Ikora said, “Talk to me again.”  
  
She nodded with more certainty. Met each of the Vanguard’s eyes and followed Toland out.  
  
He had barely reached the top of the steps by the time she caught up with him. Maybe he hesitated because he hadn’t seen the Tower in a long time, or because the stairs were difficult for him; she could see now that his legs were shaking, from fear or disuse. With his back to her, he was a pillar of darkness again - with, she realized suddenly, no Ghost.  
  
The reason he stopped wasn’t really a riddle at all, though. His eyes would be prickling against the sun, welling with pressure but unable to make tears. If his emergence was anything like hers, the world would be far too bright.  
  
She resolved that her first words to him would not be advice. She had too much dignity for that.  
  
“You were dead,” she said.  
  
“It has been a long time, Eris. Do you enjoy the vacuity of the Vanguard? Perhaps they leave you time to think.”  
  
It was a struggle to get her thoughts in order. Void and Radiance warped and tangled, dipping in and out of the darkness that clouded her (that clouded both of them). She had had a long afternoon in front of her, and the sun through the windows. Nevertheless, she managed an accusation. “You know the eyes. But you don’t know how to take care of them.”  
  
Toland shook his head.  
  
“It is the light,” Eris said. “You don’t see well in the sun. I know.” She paced, sat down on the stair beside him. They weren’t hidden, but what did it matter if Guardians hurried past? They were always running. She didn’t want to be in a space more confined than this with him yet.

“Those eyes are suited for the caves.”  
  
He crouched down next to her, slowly. “Yours bleed because you cover them.”  
  
“I can see in the sunlight because I cover them. And it is not blood.” She reached out and touched his cheek, not on the enflamed skin around the eye but where the tracks of black liquid would have been on her own skin.  
  
Gradually, as if unsure of his footing, he sat on the stair. “Will you teach me the ways of the new world?” He spoke it gently, so that she could not tell whether he meant it. A few more words were lost in whispers, from his mouth or from behind her eyes.  
  
She said, “Tell me why you are here.”  
  
For a long moment he looked at her, the mirror-image strangeness of the eyes making his presence a distant thing. She looked so alien and perturbed to Guardians, she knew. He looked the same, not strange but disgustingly familiar, leaning back as if to invite her to marvel at him.  
  
Then Toland began to hum. In her mind the words of half-familiar songs burned black pits in his throat; the words fluted up to a sky gone dark, the clouds shredded. Their shapes told her of distances traveled and realms turned inside out, shedding their bones. Each footstep she walked was sharp and precise to the molecule. How easy, to speak in a language that bored straight into the brain: how beautiful the tatters and the blood. Eris felt her pulse in her throat, and breathed in deep to calm its jumping.  
  
Still humming, still gentle, Toland tucked his thumbs underneath the gauze near her ears.  
  
“No.” Eris caught his left hand, felt the palm of his right press slackly against her cheek. The sun was back, the red leaves of a Tower tree dappling the stone. He tipped his head.  
  
And why shouldn’t he see the horns that had been growing from her skull, that had only added density and small, triangular points along their length since she returned from the pit? He had them too, although his shone greener and his hair came in more neatly around them. Why not show him the eyes? He had seen them before, even when they were in something else’s head.  
  
The look he was giving her now, though. He had looked like this at Hive corpses he had eaten.  
  
She pulled his hand toward her and pressed her lips against the ichor-smudged knuckles. “Tell me why you came here.”  
  
He nodded, then looked down at the steps in an abrupt twist of shame or pain. “I will. But it is too bright here.”  
  
“I know. The presence of the Guardians soothes that pain as well as the others.”  
  
He didn’t respond to that, but skeptical and grave, he rose when she tugged on his hand.

  
                    III.

  
  
TYPE: Transcript.  
DESCRIPTION: Conversation.  
PARTIES: Two [2]. One [1] Guardian-type, designate Cayde-6 (v3.2.0) [1], One [1] Human-type, Amanda Holliday, Last City [2] ASSOCIATIONS: Tower; Tower Hangar; Eris Morn; Toland the Shattered; Hive; Savathûn; Contraband.  
//AUDIO UNAVAILABLE//  
//TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS…/  
  
[1.1] You ever hear of an idea so horrible it might as well be your own death on you, but somebody's gonna do it anyway?  
  
[2.1] Light, Cayde, what needs hauling now?  
  
[1.2] It isn't - look, did Eris come this way?  
  
[2.2] Nope.  
  
[1.3] You know, dark, greenish, creepy? Or another one like her?  
  
[2.3] So that’s what it's about. I heard there was another one out on the concourse. Guardians been asking about new materials.  
  
[1.4] Weird stuff goes on these days, Amanda. Now anyway, about the -  
  
[2.4] Wait, you're not gonna tell me who he is?  
  
[1.5] If we’re lucky, we’re gonna win the war. Again. If we’re not lucky ... you come find me if you can, okay?  
  
//SILENCE//  
  
[2.5] So same as any other day, huh?  
  
[1.6] Yeah. About those shipments to the Cosmodrome.

  
  
                        IV.

  
  
Eris kept watch in the halls, making sure that nothing had shifted in the shapes of the lintels or the beams, then went inside.  
  
Her room was an in-between place, a quirk of the ancient architecture of the Tower. The idea of closing the door while Toland stood there was, for a moment, terrifying: but he looked owlishly around, and she had reminded herself many times that she was not in the caves. She had checked the floor for trap doors and the walls for eyes. She had brought books of her own, and thrown blankets marked with her own sigil on the rope bed and straw mattress.  
  
He wore her sign too, she saw. It burned on his bond.  
  
She said, “Explain yourself,” suddenly furious that he should hold some loyalty to her or her team after all this time.  
  
“With words or songs?” he said.  
  
“With words.”  
  
“Are you sure? The Deathsingers’ dirge is so much sweeter, and we could have an audience with Savathûn herself.” He shuffled closer to her, his hair falling over his face. “The queen of depth and darkness has left many holes in her briny armor.”  
  
“Speak to me as you would to the Vanguard.” She stood up straighter. Remembered defying him other times, and remembered stark comforts.  
  
Toland just used her posture as an excuse to look down at her, his gaze resting aslant on the cloth that covered her ear. He seemed unsure what to do with his hands. “Those simpletons.” His teeth caught at his lip. “Like speaking to children, compared to the wealth of words we had between us.” He meant Hive-legends, tomes and tomes of associations caked in the blood of hundreds of species from stars for which Eris had no name. Easy as breathing in and knowing oxygen.  
  
And a far, far better way to spy on the Hive. This was one of the purposes for which Eris had survived, and thinking this way of the dead brought her a clarity she had almost lost. Maybe she _should_ speak to him in the Darkness.  
  
Toland shattered the world around her before she finished saying _yes_.  
  
In the middle of it like this, she could see what his existence in the Tower really meant. His appearance and Savathûn’s were exactly what he said they were: convergent breaches, linked by causality. One created the other, which then fed back into it in an invisible, mortal circuit. This might have been accidental or intentional, might have been spoken into being like a curse or formed namelessly, like an easy friendship. Either way, now Eris knew it. She knew too that it wasn’t a weapon right now, couldn’t be used since it wasn’t in her hands. However, it helped her suss out the structure of the world into which Toland had brought her.  
  
He spoke shapes into existence.  
  
She had a feeling that she should remember those words, that she might need to say them a particular way in order to get something truly cataclysmic to happen later. Inter-dimensional bombardment from orbit, high chance of collateral damage.  
  
It was hard to tell with Toland what was advice and what was aggrandizement he had convinced himself defined the universe, but she had had a lot of practice.  
  
Just their luck that his sense of aggrandizement matched the way the Hive saw the world.  
  
And then there was Savathûn. Toland told Eris about her with the discordant notes of the Hive royal family; rhythms of Oryx and Crota, of the terrible days-that-were-not-days. Time tugged at Eris, begging to be untethered from what her heart and lungs told her. If she could only change their rhythm to Savathûn’s, she would flow like water through the storm.  
  
Toland tugged at her arm, reminding her of her own existence. So it had been in the caves, so it was now - but Eris also knew, and spoke her own words, and saw more clearly.  
  
They stood on a blasted plain with a line drawn in the center. Beyond the line was a black cliff that dropped away into blackness. The Hive-queen, Savathûn the wise, Savathûn the second, waited for them.  
  
And Eris saw suddenly that all words in this world were combat just as all words were music. Savathûn lowered a sword like the opening of a conversation. Toland conjured not-Light not-Void in both of his hands and hit her.  
  
And all they needed to say, really, was in the fight: Eris darted to the side and found that the familiar green energy in her hand was also a sword. She ripped at the Hive with her blade, cutting off strips of green-black skin. Somewhere on the other side of Savathûn’s gesturing, signing hand, Toland flew within the reach of the sword and bled her.  
  
Savathûn’s blood curled in on itself and became a fog in which were hundreds of smaller Savathûn-voices bleeding their own blood, which bore more.  
  
Eris stabbed the monster in the foot, then climbed to its clawed hands with Hunter grace. As she did, the words faded; the cuts were no longer language, but something more human, more Light. As she forgot them, she forgot the Tower. The echo of Savathûn is only an echo, a song still said in her mind. Toland might betray her, but she had some measure of control over his world, and she could test what his imaginings meant.  
  
The sword came down, and Toland flared with light again. The world cracked open as he forced Savathûn back with cuts and bruises of light. Savathûn’s claws were over the ledge, then her hands.  
  
Toland followed in reverse. He had gripped one of Savathûn’s horns and would not let go, too consumed with his own wild attacks. Eris watched him go.  
  
Then, it was her turn. Sword-logic abhorred equilibrium.  
  
Eris swept in. A piercing silver needle of her awareness darted down the cliff and speared him. Perhaps a Warlock could have done it with more grace, or someone who was not Hive-trained with more gentleness. As it was it hurt, having a dark essence driven in through one’s consciousness like that, but he was made of Light like the rest of the Guardians despite his best efforts, and Eris dragged him in like flotsam from the Reef.  
  
She stopped the song.  
  
The world ended.  
  
The ending left them back in her room, the daylight still very bright between the white walls and the tiny window. There was horror in his face, and exhaustion, written in the regolithic pallor of the long bones of his cheeks. When she kept his gaze a moment longer he stumbled forward.  
  
The first kiss had everything in it: the hate and the want and the loss, Eriana-fire and Tarlowe-stone. A memory popped like a light: all of them drinking, passing a bottle. The second was all Toland-terror and gasps and the oily slick of the black ichor on her own face.  
  
“Eris, Eris, the prophet for this desert population,” Toland breathed when he could, his arms around her shoulders. “Your haruspicy has kept them all looking to the stars while you look at the corpses.”  
  
When she lifted her head off his shoulder to respond, he dragged his lips across her cheek. “They’re stepping in the blood and the bones.”  
  
“What have you shown me?” She thought she knew. Wanted to hear it from him.  
  
He tried to get his arms around her and lift her up, but stumbled again. Exhausted, she thought, or sick with traces from that other world, or just confused. Moving him away from the sun, away from the Vanguard, had not helped. Instead she put her arm around his waist and shoved her shoulder under his arm, not gently. She could tell that he wanted to close the eyes by the way they squinted and twitched.  
  
He followed her to the cot and lay on his back, shivering. Licked dry lips and managed to eke some command into his wheedling voice.  
  
“Sing to me, Eris.”  
  
She sat down beside him, realizing then how she had almost fallen in her own exhaustion. “I don’t know all the songs that you do.”  
  
“Sing anything.” He struggled to close the eyes again, realized with more self-awareness that he couldn’t.  
  
“You won’t be able to close them for a long time,” she said, and stroked his forehead without thinking much about it.  
  
The skin around the eye was puckered and pale, but the lines relaxed as she smoothed it. Why the growths above his eyes seemed younger than hers baffled her; perhaps he had been entirely incorporeal, but the world had remembered his shape, and now the growths were catching up.  
  
He turned onto his shoulder, away from her. She understood the sentiment, and so waited a moment before laying down against his back. When she sang, she started with Hunter songs: things meant to be sung by fireteams on long patrols, stories of past heroes and tragedies. Mostly tragedies, really: blood-feuds, love-feuds, accidents. Her voice was not strong when it came to the notes, sometimes croaked and warped, but she considered her audience and vehemently did not care.  
  
Eventually, by the time she was considering that all she knew now were drinking songs, she felt his shoulders slump, and the knotty curve of his spine seemed gentler against her chest. He shifted to put an arm around her, still not looking her in the eyes. His fingers delved into her cowl and brushed toward the chitin points in her hair, and she flinched with an acerbity that startled through him.  
  
“No,” Eris said, and Toland withdrew.

  
  
                    V.

First, there was nothing: just the wind over the City, and steel gray clouds in the distance. It could have been any day on the Tower, although the Guardians were quieter than usual. Could still have been a ritual day, an Iron Banner day, anything that would leave the promenade mostly empty or scatter people.  
  
Then one plume of smoke went up from the Wall like ink spilled from a cup, bleeding into the parchment-colored sky.  
  
Ikora, who could hear the stars boiling, inclined her head toward her fellow advisers with the most patient disdain Cayde had ever seen.  
  
“It’s Savathûn,” Ikora’s Ghost said. “She’s brought her troops down near the Wall.”  
  
Cayde had his hand on his gun and his eyes on the corridor the moment the little light started talking. He could get off planet if he flew low and hooked around the other side of the world. Let the Hive eat his exhaust; he’d sit on Charon until it was all over.  
  
But that was an older Cayde talking, and a more cowardly one. He knew it, but he could never quite tell whether he had really decided on it first or had caught Eris’ eyes first. She was standing with Toland at the head of the table, her lips parted in what was almost a sneer. Not judgement for him alone, though; that was her war face. He had seen it the first time they sent Guardians to the Dreadnaught. She hadn’t had an honest-to-Light emerald sword in her hands that time though, hadn’t had her fingers intertwined with those of the night-black shape beside her. Something was so wrong with Toland that he almost flickered.  
  
“We know her secret,” Eris said, and Cayde almost winced with how well she replicated the sonorous Warlock bark. That voice would strip ink from books, or something. _Good going, kid. What exactly do you know?_  
  
Ikora agreed, and Zavala tight-lipped agreed, and Cayde agreed before he half-way knew what he was doing, which was how he liked his missions to go.  
  
He thought of a girl and a fall of cards. Love stories were vicious things.  
  
First, there was war, and a line in the dirt.

  
  
                        VI.  

  
  
Eris stood on the empty pavement.  
  
If she had been in a jumpship with the gunners below her, she might have seen the lines of refugees coming into the Last City. There weren’t many people who hadn’t left or dug in, but some had fled the Hive swarm. Maybe they had felt it in the Earth.  
  
“One last chance,” Toland said, and circled her. “The Tower will become an alter.”  
  
“We will defend it.”  
  
He circled again and trailed his fingers across her back. She could only hear the clicking on her armor. “And then what? The endless fight?”  
  
“If that is what must be done,” Eris said.  
  
“Let me teach you to look down on this world. It looks so much more intricate from the vaulted spaces.”  
  
He thought that he was convincing her, Eris knew. He thought this was a seduction.  
  
Eris didn’t have to speak to agree.  
  
Instead, she pulled her awareness out of her body through the lodestone that was the Light and the emerald sword. Toland was caught up in the whirlwind of it sooner than he expected,  but he recovered quickly. Eris built a world smaller than the one she knew, where the Tower was a bauble and the wall was like a thorny fence. Toland surveyed it like a king.  
  
Then he realized what she knew, and turned to look at her. His two eyes were dark and narrow.  
  
The earlier encounter with Savathûn had been an education, or a shared dream: Toland had brought her to the edge of Savathûn’s world and bid her look over just before he almost fell off the cliff of it. Now, the awareness Eris instigated created a bubble world of possibility. She made its rules by bringing her own assumptions and her own ideas about its architecture in with her, and once created, those rules could not be broken. Those metaphors could not be mixed.  
  
Eris felt Ikora understand those rules almost as soon as she did.  
  
The vocabulary open to the Warlock was different, but it conveyed the same information: that this Savathûn was just a shadow, or an echo. That was why the Warminds had never seen her. Perhaps the ship in Saturn’s rings was real, but Eris did not think so. It didn’t sing.  
  
Out on the plains, the illusion of a Hive god took mile-long steps on the frozen ground. On the Tower, Eris hit Toland across the face, once, twice, with a closed hand.  
  
In her mind, she cut the cords that bound the Savathûn-echo to the world.  
  
When Ikora knew, she taught the rest of the Vanguard; when the Vanguard shouted, every burst of Void and Light gained a new awareness. Savathûn’s form dissipated into a black cloud, her song a fading rumble like a distant storm. Darkness most Guardians had probably not even noticed was suddenly wiped away. What Hive did not disappear were the work of any lazy afternoon for the Guardians. Eris felt Cayde’s Light flare.  
  
Then she was looking through the mesh that she had tied in front of her eyes that morning. Toland was shielding his face with one hand. The Light felt brittle, but the Traveler hung alone in the sky. Dots in the distance were Guardians wheeling.  
  
Eris laughed low like the mouth of the pit.  
  
Toland slumped against the low wall. Eris crossed to him, and met all three eyes. That his sight lines made sense was reassuring and comforting; it felt like an entire world opening up. “You brought her here. This illusion of her. You were linked. That was why your very existence on this plane was taxing for you.”  
  
“A simplification, dearest Eris,” Toland said, tired and rasping.

"Why did you do any of this?"

"Why do the Hive do what they do?"

She had a quick answer.  
  
“Even when you were using the illusion to convince me, hurting it also hurt you. Isn’t it right that I’ve killed you?” She could feel that it was. It had fulfilled the sword-logic, and something in her was exulting and singing. “This death is love, and this will keep you fighting.” She swiped her hand through his hair, and kept going when he leaned toward her hand. "I am sorry that I had to hit you."  
  
“You were deceiving me all along,” he said suddenly, laughing in a cold, bone-dry burst and standing up straighter. “When did you know?”  
  
“When I pulled you off the cliff. The Vanguard knew before that, but I would have found out.”  
  
“You’ve given me as sacrifice.” He sounded admiring.  
  
“I will cut you into pieces,” she said, and kissed him.  
  
By the time she had tangled her hands in his hair he was fading or pulling away, his smile curling under her mouth. When she brushed her thumbs across the ragged chitin his breath caught and held, whatever sound he had been going to make clipped off. Then her hands slapped down on the wall, and she felt the last of his presence fade away. Terrible loneliness, and then the distant mental banter of the Vanguard, indistinguishable as a whisper. Eris Morn, adamant and sanguine, looked at what was left of the war zone alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is the [source of the title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKAnrej6mPA), and an example of what I imagine the tone of the Hunter songs to be like.


End file.
